Fatherhood Quotes

“That anyone could father a child, but a real man chooses to be a dad.”
― J. Sterling, The Perfect Game

“What a face this girl possessed!—could I not gaze at it every day I would need to recreate it through painting, sculpture, or fatherhood until a second such face is born. Her face, at once innocent and feral, soft and wild! Her mouth voluptuous. Eyes deep as oceans, her eyes as wide as planets. I likened her to the slender Psyché and judged that the perfection of her face ennobled everything unclean around her: the dusty hems of her bunched-up skirt, the worn straps of her nightshirt; the blackened soles of her tiny bare feet, the coal-stained balcony bricks upon which she sat, and that dusty wrought-ironwork that framed her perch. All this and the pungent air!—almost foul, with so many odors. Ô, that and the spicy night!…Pungency, spice, filth and night, dust and light; all things dark did blossom in sight; flower and bloom, the night has its pearl too—the moon! And once a month it will make the face of this tender girl bloom.”
― Roman Payne

“Forget Batman: when I really thought about what I wanted to be when I grew up, I wanted to be my dad.”
― Paul Asay, God on the Streets of Gotham: What the Big Screen Batman Can Teach Us about God and Ourselves

“The greatest thing a father can do for his daughter is to love her mother.”
― Elaine S. Dalton

“A father knows his child's heart, as only a child can know his fathers.”
― Kazuo Koike, Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 1: The Assassin's Road

“Behind every great man is a man greater, his father.”
― Habeeb Akande

“I'm very at ease, and I like it. I never thought I would be such a family-oriented guy; I didn't think that was part of my makeup. But somebody said that as you get older you become the person you always should have been, and I feel that's happening to me. I'm rather surprised at who I am, because I'm actually like my dad!
David Bowie”
― David Bowie

“He didn't want Lucy to grow up feeling alone, surrounded by everything and having nothing.”
― Kim Harrison, Into the Woods: Tales from the Hollows and Beyond

“It is very easy to be a military strategist, a mercenary, or a king, but much harder to be a father.”
― Nadia Scrieva, Tides of Tranquility

“A child playing with its father screams louder, laughs harder, jumps more eagerly, puts more faith in everything.”
― Lydia Netzer

“These young-marrying, contemporaries or juniors of the Beat Generation, have often expressed themselves as follows:" My highest aim in life is to achieve a normal healthy marriage and raise healthy [non-neurotic] children. "On the face of it, this remark is preposterous. What was always taken as a usual and advantageous life-condition for work in the world and the service of God, is now regarded as an heroic goal to be striven for. Yet we see that it is a hard goal to achieve against the modern obstacles. Also it is a real goal, with objective problems that a man can work at personally, and take responsibility for, and make decisions about—unlike the interpersonal relations of the corporation, or the routine of the factory job for which the worker couldn't care less.
But now, suppose the young man is achieving this goal: he has the wife, the small kids, the suburban home, and the labor-saving domestic devices. How is it that it is the same man who uniformly asserts that he is in a Rat Race? Either the goal does not justify itself, or indeed he is not really achieving it. Perhaps the truth is, if marriage and children are the goal, a man cannot really achieve it. It is not easy to conceive of a strong husband and father who does not justified in his work and independent in the world. Correspondingly, his wife feels justified in the small children, but does she have a man, do the children have a father, if he is running a Rat Race? Into what world do the small children grow up in such a home?”
― Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System

“He welcomes the chance to do fatherly things with the little girl, and those ten morning minutes with dear little four-year-old Ruby, with her deep soulful eyes, and the wondrous things she sees with them, and her deep soulful voice, and the precious though not entirely memorable things she says with it, and the smell of baby shampoo and breakfast cereal filling the car, that little shimmering capsule of time is like listening to cello music in the morning, or watching birds in a flutter of industry building a nest, it simply reminds you that even if God is dead, or never existed in the first place, there is, nevertheless, something tender at the center of creation, some meaning, some purpose and poetry.”
― Scott Spencer, A Ship Made of Paper

“That evening he plays with the children, cleans the hamster's cage with them, gets them into their pyjamas, and reads to them three times over, once together, then to Jake on his own, then to Naomi. It is at times like these that his life makes sense. How soothing it is, the scent of clean bedlinen and minty toothpaste breath, and his children's eagerness to hear the adventures of imaginary beings, and how touching, to watch the children's eyes grow heavy as they struggle to hang on to the priceless last minutes of their day, and finally fail.”
― Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth

“Of all the titles that I've been privileged to have, the title of 'dad' has always been the best.”
― Ken Norton